


sweater paws

by tostitos



Category: Monsta X (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Elementary School, Cat/Human Hybrids, Cute Kids, Fluff, Gen, M/M, Minhyuk is a little shit, can be read as innocent friendship or, shy cuties, the unknowing start of a crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-22 11:28:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17058950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tostitos/pseuds/tostitos
Summary: The lady next door always leaves milk out for the neighborhood cats and they seem really happy, so why doesn’t Kihyun share his milk with the weird, new boy in class?





	sweater paws

**Author's Note:**

> i actually hate this. but if it makes me 25% finished with the bingo, then whatever lmao. for the 'kids' square
> 
> leave it to me to fixate on a completely useless detail in the fic for the title

“If you like, you can color your thank you notes,” says Ms. Jung as she places the extra copies of the paper they’re using for their notes on her desk. “But only after you let me read what you wrote.”

Kihyun stares down at the paper in front of him, mindlessly dragging the eraser of his pencil along the top of his desk. He doens’t know what to write. Ms. Ok was nice and her gym classes were fun but how does he write five sentences? What more should he say after ‘thanks Ms. Ok! I enjoyed class with you!’.

Just as he bites his lip and decides to start writing, an arm brushes against the tip of his nose as it reaches past him and then there’s a whole body leaning into his space.

“Hey. Hey hey. Hey,” calls the boy with the always wild hair who sits to his left, flapping his hand like a bird’s wing. “Hey, ca—“

Dropping his pencil with an annoyed huff, Kihyun knocks the hand out of his way and nudges the other boy with his shoulder. “Go away, Minhyuk.”

Minhyuk makes a face before turning his attention back to the boy sitting to Kihyun’s right.

The boy Kihyun tries not to look at if he doesn’t have to. Not because the boy is mean or anything, but Kihyun doesn’t know how to look without staring and his mom always says staring is impolite.

“Can you talk?” Minhyuk blurts out, a huge grin splitting his face.

Kihyun pushes him away again, mumbling under his breath. “I think that’s rude to ask.”

Shrugging, Minhyuk crosses Kihyun’s boundary again. “I just wanna know why they let an animal join the school if he can’t talk to us.”

The boy on Kihyun’s right goes rigid at Minhyuk’s words. Or, well, every part of him goes stiff aside from the short tail that waves frantically behind him. Kihyun nudges Minhyuk in his side with his elbow close to a million times, something weird bubbling in his stomach.

_‘This is Hyungwon,’ Ms. Jung had said as she placed a hand on Hyungwon’s head and ruffled his hair. The boy’s tail shot up and he flinched at her touch. Ms. Jung looked down at him with a small frown that turned into an odd smile at the rest of the class. ‘He’ll be joining us from today. Be good to him. He’s used to being around other cats so he’ll be a little uncomfortable at first, okay?”_

Kihyun hasn’t met very many hybrids before — really, he’s only ever _met_ Hyungwon — but he’s sure it can’t be nice to call them ‘animals’. They’re more like Kihyun and Minhyuk and Ms. Jung than they are like Minhyuk’s dog or the stray cats running around.

Out of the corner of his eye, he glances at Hyungwon and sees him staring down at the paper in front of him, teeth a little sharper than Kihyun and Minhyuk’s poking into his bottom lip as he frowns deeply.

“Minhyuk, you _can’t_ _say that_ ,” Kihyun hisses.

Returning one of Kihyun’s elbow jabs with one of his own, Minhyuk scowls. “ _What_? He hasn’t said anything since he got here and it’s been like a whole month.”

It’s been a little over two weeks but Kihyun doesn’t say that because Minhyuk is talking over him again.

“You don’t even meow or anything. Does your voice not work?”

“ _Minhyuk_.”

“Kihyun, Minhyuk,” calls Ms. Jung. Kihyun looks over at her sitting at her desk with wide eyes, wondering if she can see how uncomfortable Hyungwon is. “Is there something wrong?”

Minhyuk throws on a big smile, the one all the teachers love, and shakes his head. “No, Ms. Jung.”

 

Kihyun isn’t afraid of heights, not like Lee Hoseok in class 5-2 who cried when his class practiced pole climbing in gym class, but he still doesn’t like using the jungle gym. Maybe because sometimes the sixth grade girls go up to the top to talk and what fun is it if people are just sitting in the way.

There are no girls up there now, though, and he climbs to the top to join the boy who _is_ there.

“H-Hi,” he stutters as he tries to crawl over the bars of the jungle gym to get closer to Hyungwon who blinks at him with big, round eyes. He never noticed until now, but they’re more a bronze than an earthy brown and the black part of his eye is more oval than round. Like halfway between human and a cat eye.

It’s kinda creepy but also kinda cool.

Hyungwon doesn’t say anything, not like Kihyun expected him to. He blinks at Kihyun and then he glances down at his hands balled in the too long sleeves of his cardigan before looking back out toward the field.

Kihyun tries to not fall when he crosses his legs. “What are you doing up here? Don’t you want to play?”

He doesn’t think Hyungwon will respond to his questions either and he’s right. The cat just sits there silently, every bit of him still but the slow swish of his little tail and the shiver of his shoulders whenever the breeze picks up.

Kihyun picks at the dead skin around his thumb nail and tries not to give up. The thing with Minhyuk — with almost every student who tries to interact with Hyungwon — made him feel bad. Hyungwon might be strange, both in appearance and how he acts, but Ms. Jung _did_ say he’s not used to humans. It’s not fair of them, Kihyun included, to treat him like he’s a freak of nature or a crazy circus act.

The problem is: Kihyun doesn’t know what to do to make Hyungwon feel like he can open up.

“I’m sorry about Minhyuk,” he ends up saying.

He shouldn’t have to; _he_ didn’t say anything wrong and he doesn’t even like Minhyuk, but he was there so he apologizes anyway.

Glancing down at his thumb, he tugs at a piece of skin with his nails. He misses any sort of reaction on Hyungwon’s face.

 

“Good afternoon, Kihyun.”

Looking up from his dad’s phone — he lets Kihyun borrow it to play Pokémon Go sometimes — Kihyun grins at the woman exiting her front door, a small plastic bowl in her hands.

“Oh, hey, Mrs. Park,” he greets his next door neighbor.

She’s pretty awesome. Has two really cool snakes and a bunch of godzilla stickers on her car.

Kihyun hears the meow before he sees the cat, a scrawny black thing that wandered into their neighborhood a few months ago. The cat is sitting in the small patch of grass outside Mrs. Park’s house.

“Hey, Darkwing.”

The cat doesn’t react to the name it just suddenly seemed to have one day. It kind of reminds Kihyun of Hyungwon.

Mrs. Park walks out to where the cat is, stopping a few steps away so she doesn’t scare him. The three cats that roam around come often and are usually pretty friendly, but everyone tries to be careful.

She sets the bowl down, halfway full of milk. “The other two came by last night. I swear I only buy milk for these cats.”

The phone in Kihyun’s hand vibrates and he glances down to see a Pidgey has spawned. Tapping it, he snorts when the camera shows it hovering over Darkwing. He tries to throw a curveball at it and misses.

“But they love you for it. They always come here to chill.”

As soon as the words are out of Kihyun’s mouth, he pauses. Strays are usually uncomfortable around humans. Darkwing and the other cats got less afraid of her when she started leaving them something to drink. Cats like milk. The school lunch only offers water but Kihyun brings his own lunch. And milk.

It might be a stupid idea but stupid ideas work sometimes.

“Kihyun? Are you alright?”

Snapping out of his head, Kihyun looks up at Mrs. Park who is looking at him with a raised eyebrow. “Huh? Yeah...yeah, I just thought of something.” He grins. “Thanks for your help, Mrs. Park!”

She chuckles. “Don’t know what I helped with but you’re welcome, kid.”

 

Thankfully, Minhyuk is absent when Kihyun finally gets his mom to add an extra bottle of milk to his lunch box. He’d rather not have the other boy’s teasing ruin this.

Unzipping his lunch box and taking out the containers holding whatever his mom threw in there, Kihyun stares at the two bottles of milk left. He takes a deep breath in and blows it out slowly, building up his confidence. Then he reaches in and takes one of the bottles out.

“Um, Hyungwon...” He looks at the kitten who is lazily twirling his chopsticks in the plain noodle salad on his lunch tray.

Slowly, Hyungwon turns to him with curiousity in his eyes.

“I-I have an extra bottle of milk. I don’t know why! But if you want it, you can have it,” Kihyun says, voice crackling awkwardly in the middle. Inwardly, he cringes, hoping he didn’t sound as stupid as he thinks he did.

He places the milk on the space where his desk meets Hyungwon’s and reaches back into his lunch box to take out his own milk.

Mrs. Park never made the cats feel like they needed to drink, just left the milk out and let them choose to accept or not. Kihyun assumes he should do the same.

So, he opens up all of the containers of his lunch and starts to eat. His heart beats so fast he feels like he’s just finished running a race but he tries hard to pretend he’s not dying of nerves.

He wants Hyungwon to feel welcome. He wants Hyungwon to not look so lost. He wants Hyungwon to have at least one friend.

Too many minutes pass where they both continue to eat their lunch, the milk offering left untouched between them. The closer they get to the end of lunch time, the more disappointed Kihyun gets. His heart beat slows down, but his stomach starts to roll.

Well, he thinks, it was a dumb idea anyway.

As Kihyun sulks and shoves mound after mound of rice into his mouth, a hand enters his sight and curls around the bottle in between them. With rice filling his cheeks, he glances at Hyungwon who pauses in pulling the milk closer when he realizes Kihyun’s attention on him.

When Kihyun doesn’t say anything, he finishes taking the milk. His nose twitches cutely as he stares down at the bottle, focused on peeling the plastic straw away from the side of the carton.

Kihyun notices the tips of the kitten’s ears turning pink and the uneasy feeling in his stomach turns to an airy flutter. He hurries to chew and swallow the food in his mouth so he can hold his breath without worrying about choking.

Hyungwon shoves the straw past the film covering the mouth of the bottle and then stops. Then... _then_ , he looks at Kihyun with the faintest hint of a smile and those big, big kitten eyes.

“Thank you.”

 

“Oh, would you look at that,” Kihyun says as he’s taking out his lunch a couple days later. “Why does my mom keep giving me extra milk?”

He takes out both bottles from his lunch box, putting on a look of confusion as he looks at them.

“Maybe she’s afraid you’re going to be short when you grow up,” Minhyuk says, rocking back in his chair as he waits for Ms. Jung to start their greetings.

Kihyun shoves an elbow into Minhyuk’s side and sits one of the bottles on the crack between his and Hyungwon’s desks.

“That _hurt_ ,” complains Minhyuk. “Stop doing that.”

At the front of the class, Ms. Jung calls for their attention to say their greetings and everyone presses their palms together. Kihyun mumbles out his thanks before reaching for his milk again and shoving the straw through the top. As he lifts it to his mouth, he notices a shy hand edging closer toward his desk before retreating and then coming closer again.

Hyungwon freezes when Kihyun turns to face him. His eyes widen and his tail whips nervously behind him.

Shooting him a quick smile, Kihyun gives a tiny nod of his head and mouths ‘go for it.’ Before he turns away, he sees the kitten’s ears turn a light pink and feels something like complete satisfaction dance in his chest.

Fiddling with his straw, Kihyun sees Hyungwon take the drink from the corner of his eye. Eating is the last thing on his mind as he waits to see if Hyungwon will say something today. He hasn’t said anything to Kihyun since lunch two days ago, but there’s something in his eyes now — something a little more open and friendly.

Hyungwon hums after he takes a sip of milk and then he does something Kihyun didn’t think he could, despite being part cat: he _purrs_. Just a small hum that Kihyun only hears because both of his ears are one hundred percent focused on the kitten boy.

“What’s wrong with you?” And then Minhyuk is leaning all over him. “You’re not eating. Do you not want those meatballs ‘cause I’ll take them.”

 

Kihyun brings milk three more times for the next week and a half, despite his parent’s confusion as to why he’s suddenly so worried about ‘calcium and strong bones’. Hyungwon only mumbles out another quiet ‘thank you’ one of those times, but he always gives a pleased smile and sometimes he’ll start purring, so Kihyun doesn’t really care.

Maybe they’re not friends yet and maybe Hyungwon will stop smiling at him when they bump arms or meet eyes when Kihyun stops bringing milk, but, for now, the kitten seems happy.

 

“...Hi.” An unfamiliar voice whispers close to Kihyun. “D-Do you mind if I sit here?”

They’re practicing how to do research so they’re in the library looking for books. Kihyun has a science picture book on amphibians on the table in front of him, open to a page on different kinds of frogs.

He looks up, wondering who in the world it could be since only his class is in the library, and his eyes go wide when he sees Hyungwon looking at him.

His cheeks are a pale pink and one of his tiny, pointy teeth is poking into his bottom lip. Kihyun wonders if that hurts.

“Yeah!” Kihyun chirps and then hunches down in his chair when Ms. Jung reminds them all to be quiet in the library.

Hyungwon puts down his book, and as he slides out the chair, Kihyun looks over at it.

“Birds?”

Sitting down, Hyungwon nods.

“Cool.”

Hyungwon flips open his book. He plays with the bent corner of the hard cover page. “...Frogs are cool too.”

Kihyun doesn’t really like frogs. “Yeah, they are.”

Hyungwon doesn’t say anything and in the not so awkward silence, Kihyun hears just how hard his heart is beating. Like a drum solo played by someone with eight arms. But he can’t help being nervous and excited and satisfied because Hyungwon finally spoke to him! On his own without Kihyun talking to him or passing him a bottle of milk first!

His voice is nice, and it’s cute how there’s a faintly noticeable squeak under all of Hyungwon’s words. Some of the other kids make jokes about Hyungwon not talking because he can only meow; Kihyun knows he can purr, but he wonders if Hyungwon can meow too or if that’s not included in being a cat hybrid.

Hyungwon turns the page of his book and his elbow brushes against Kihyun’s arm. They glance at each other, Hyungwon still pink in the cheeks and Kihyun a little red around the tips of his ears.

“Sorry...” Hyungwon mumbles and teethes at his lip.

Kihyun shakes his head. “I-It’s okay.” He’s a really good student and doesn’t get distracted easily but all Kihyun hears running through his mind is ‘we’re talking, we’re talking, we’re _talking_ ‘.

They stare at each other for too long and when Hyungwon finally glances down, his blush is a little more intense.

“I don’t like frogs,” he admits suddenly, looking straight at Kihyun’s book.

Kihyun grins. “Me neither.”

Blinking, Hyungwon glances back up at Kihyun and they lock eyes again for a few seconds before dissolving into quiet giggles.

 

“I don’t like meeting new people,” Hyungwon says a few days later during recess. They’re at the top of the jungle gym again, the sixth grade girls choosing to walk in circles around the field and chat.

He plays with the ends of his sweater, the sleeves just as long as they always are and hanging over his knuckles. “And I didn’t like how everyone made me feel like I was weird for being a cat. It just felt like everyone was making fun of me. So I didn’t want to talk to anyone.”

He pouts.

Funnily enough, Kihyun thinks it makes him look like a puppy.

The human boy nods, understanding where Hyungwon is coming from. He knew it was hard for the kitten, being the only hybrid in the school and having to get used to being around everyone. Kihyun used to think he was strange too, but he never liked watching the other kids meow at Hyungwon or try to touch his tail without permissions or crowd around him like he was a pet instead of a person. Even if they weren’t trying to be, they were mean and Hyungwon didn’t deserve that.

“But you were always nice.” Hyungwon glances at up Kihyun. “I thought you didn’t like me but at the same time you also tried to help me with Minhyuk.”

Kihyun frowns. “Why did you think I didn’t like you?”

Shrugging, Hyungwon untucks his legs to let them dangle through the holes in the bars. “You never looked at me. It was really confusing when you gave me milk.”

“Oh...I didn’t know what to do. I’ve never met a hybrid before,” Kihyun says, feeling a little apologetic. “But now I like you a lot.”

Hyungwon blinks at him. His tail whips up behind him.

Suddenly, Kihyun feels embarrassed and he doesn’t know why.

Hyungwon gives a tiny smile. Just over the sound of everyone playing around them, Kihyun can hear the sound of him starting to purr.

“I like you a lot too.”


End file.
